The IC Insights report (via Seeking Alpha) shows, as many of us had expected, that it has been a strong start to the year for the semiconductor industry, with some key numbers. The top 15 companies in terms of revenue increased their sales in the first few months of the year by 21% over the same period last year.

Intel had the largest sales at $18.7 billion, but its revenues were down 4% from the previous year. Samsung (which makes Nvidia's Ampere GPUs) was up 15% to $17.1 billion, and TSMC (which makes AMD's Zen 3 CPU and RDNA 2 GPUs) was up 25% to $12.9 billion.

Nvidia ranked 8th, with $4.6B in sales, up 51% over the same period in 2020. AMD, on the other hand, jumped up to 11th place with $3.4B in profit, a 93% improvement over the previous year; AMD and Nvidia are fabless companies, which means they rely on other semiconductor companies to actually manufacture the silicon, unlike Intel, which designs and manufactures its own chips.

The report notes that Intel is the only one of the top 15 companies that does not boast year-over-year growth. And excluding them, the remaining 14 companies posted a combined 29% increase in sales. If Intel were included, the difference would be 8%.

It goes without saying that Intel has been having problems lately, especially with their 10nm manufacturing process, but also because AMD has become a real option for our gaming PCs. Intel has a new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, who is trying to turn things around by promising to take on the foundry business, and the 10nm manufacturing process seems to be on track.

None of this should affect the hardware in our machines in the short term, but a healthy semiconductor industry should mean more investment and hopefully not the current supply shortage. Expectations.